There’s a similar editorial in USA Today this week, “Secularists, what happened to the open mind?” The author rants about all the atheists lately who can’t open their mouths without calling Christians names, and he opines that we’re driving away all the reasonable Christians who might have been our allies.

I kept wondering where this guy has been for the past twenty years! Atheists, agnostics and secularists have been trying as hard we can to open a dialogue with reasonable Christians, and what to we get for it? Nothing whatsoever. As long as the Fundamentalists are the majority, they will continue to snub us and slap our faces every chance they get. I don’t like to admit it, but we sometimes have to be squeaky wheels in order to get any grease at all in this world. At least they can’t ignore people like Dawkins and Hitchens, can they?

No, Advocatus, fundamentalists aren’t the majority. In the US, 20% of the population goes to church on a given Sunday. The number of devout believers is about the same as the number of people who’re not religious. If new atheists can’t speak without pissing off the 60% in the middle, it’s their damn fault.

In regard to this issue, I am on the millitant atheist side (to a large extent). If christians or any other religious groups don’t like what we have to say about the phenomenon and pathology of religious beliefs, I suggest they don’t read it. But, the arguments are generally well-reasoned and interesting with a lot of good philosophic method behind them and, as such, they are of interest to anyone who likes to study and try to explain human culture and its development. Nobody is forcing anyone to read it. The only objection I can imagine anyone having is the idea that their kids might read it and go and find they broadly agree with it. Well, you have to let them find their way eventually and, further, so what if they do? It’s not like they’ll be struck by a lightning bolt or turned to a pillar of salt or anything because they don’t have that much sodium and chlorine in their bodies anyway.

Well… yes, you’re part way to being right, it certainly won’t advance that if Nature continues to promote such claptrap. That passage that you omit in your quote is important in that it illustrates an almost evangelical attempt to influence, using a conversion event that (I would guess) never actually happened (I mean what a bunch of crap) to try to spread a message of idiocy to people who buy that mag for the specific pupose of getting away from such mystical religious mumbo-jumbo.

suggests that he was fully convicted of the idea that some big pixie in the sky had created this waterfall anyway.

The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.

What? Oh look the waterful’s frozen must be because of some Roman myth about some palestinian eegit getting nailed up to a tree! Pull the other one. Get this damned rubbish out of the science magazines and back into the amphitheater with the lions where it belongs.